16681: IPG Health Experiences Side Effects Of Pfizer Withdrawal.

 

Advertising Age reported IPG extended its pruning, as IPG Health confirmed cutting 5% of its staff—placing most of the blame on the Pfizer fiasco. Didn’t bother to read the full story, so not sure if the move is in addition to the 9% staff reduction at FCB Chicago, which was also blamed on the Pfizer shift.

 

It just goes to show that not only does pharmaceutical advertising suck, but working for White pharmaceutical advertising agencies sucks too—especially when the shops service sucky pharmaceutical clients.

16664: Powerlessness To The People.

 

The news of IPG continuing to prune its portfolio of White advertising agencies—as well as the Pfizer fiasco resulting in accounts and jobs shifting from IPG to Publicis Groupe—inspired a few additional thoughts.

 

There was a time when White advertising agencies declared notions like, “A company’s employees are its greatest asset and your people are your product,” and, “Your greatest assets come up and down the lift every day.”

 

Do such sentiments still apply in Adland?

 

Ad people’s jobs have never been guaranteed—or even secure—since losing an account typically prompted mass terminations. Yet now people may find themselves caught in a corporate merger and/or pruning that leads to workplace redundancies—and ultimately, to workforce reductions.

 

Additionally, White holding companies have created a commoditization of services and talent, whereby firms are generic, replaceable units, and people are indistinguishable, interchangeable drones.

 

In short, people are not assets; rather, they are simply asses. Plus, in hybrid and remote settings, they’re not coming up and down the lift every day; rather, they come online via electronic meeting platforms—often semi-anonymously with video off.

 

So, what’s the point?

 

If even White people are disrespected, discounted, and disregarded in Adland, how much worse can people of color expect to be treated?

16649: TGIF CUL8R FCB.

 

Advertising Age reported on the inevitable: ie, FCB Chicago dumped 9% of its staff—which translates to roughly 70-80 people—in response to the Pfizer fiasco.

 

A spokesperson for the White advertising agency stated, “As a result of a recent decision impacting creative assignments, we have had to make some changes to align better with client work. This was a tough decision… Our focus now is on supporting everyone through this transition and winning new business to replace the lost revenue.” Nice. Wonder if such canned sentiments were generated by the wondrous IPG AI tools.

 

Hopefully, for the newly unemployed, it’s only a matter of trekking across the city and landing one of the numerous opportunities at Publicis outhouses.

 

FCB Chicago Lays Off Staff After Losing Pfizer Account

 

IPG agency cuts 9% of staff after losing creative work from the pharma giant earlier this year

 

By E.J. Schultz and Lindsay Rittenhouse

 

FCB Chicago has laid off 9% of its staff as a result of losing the Pfizer creative account, Ad Age has learned. The Windy City office employs more than 800 people.

 

“As a result of a recent decision impacting creative assignments, we have had to make some changes to align better with client work,” a spokesperson for the Interpublic Group of Cos. agency said in a statement. “This was a tough decision and equates to approximately 9% of our people in Chicago. Our focus now is on supporting everyone through this transition and winning new business to replace the lost revenue.”

 

The layoffs come about two months after Pfizer moved the majority of its creative brand duties from IPG to Publicis Groupe. It was an abrupt move that came less than a year after IPG was named Pfizer’s lead creative partner.

 

Publicis had already been established as the pharmaceutical giant’s “integrated global engine” during the initial review and the French holding company worked on Pfizer’s 2024 Super Bowl ad, which showcased the company’s 175 years of commitment to science.

 

FCB Chicago’s existing clients include Clorox, Kimberly-Clark and Cox Communications. FCB also recently won creative work from Kenvue, although that account is led from New York.

16625: Unhealthy Hiring At Publicis Groupe.

Oh, look! Multiple open positions at Razorfish Health, Publicis Health, and Digitas Health—all within the Publicis Groupe network. The Pfizer fiasco is fueling desperate recruitment of bodies to fill workstations for the White holding company—which boasts a storied history of orchestrating monolithic mismanagement, monstrous mediocrity, and manic mayhem.

 

Wonder if miraculous Marcel is being utilized as an AI headhunter.

16595: Good Grief, Charlie!

 

Digiday published a lengthy report on Pfizer building a new generative AI platform – named Charlie – designed to ultimately create pharmaceutical marketing.

 

Publicis Groupe – utilizing its AI doodad named Marcel – helped invent Charlie, forging a partnership that probably also inspired Pfizer’s decision to shift its marketing duties from IPG to the Paris-based White holding company.

 

Wonder how long before Charlie fires Marcel…

 

With ‘Charlie,’ Pfizer is building a new generative AI platform for pharma marketing

 

By Marty Swant

 

Pfizer has developed a new generative AI platform and named it after the pharmaceutical giant’s founder.

 

Since last year, Pfizer has been developing a new AI platform to help with content supply chains and while also overhauling the company’s entire marketing workbench. “Charlie,” named after Pfizer co-founder Charles Pfizer, is now in the process of rolling out to the marketing organization. Executives say it’s still early, but the platform is now in use by Pfizer’s hundreds of people in central marketing team and thousands across the company’s various brands. It’s also being used by agency partners including Publicis Groupe and IPG.

 

A key focus for Pfizer’s strategy is improving the company’s content supply chain, according to Bill Worple, Pfizer’s vp of customer engagement platforms and technology. Along with helping with content creation and editing, generative AI also helps with fact-checking and legal reviews — something that’s especially important with highly regulated industries like pharmaceutical marketing. Using a “red, yellow, green” risk system when labeling content, Charlie can identify assets the medical review team might want to spend more time looking over. For example, a headline used many times might not need as much attention. Other creative assets might use previously approved language but now appear in a new setting while other content making new claims deserves the most time.

 

“The whole idea there is how do we triple [or] 5x our content creation to actually create messaging that resonates both for the health care providers as well as our patients,” Worple said.

 

Another focus is turning Charlie into a workbench for the entire marketing organization. That includes integrating media analytics for the company’s brands, insights about various competitors and data from various websites. Charlie is also being integrated into Adobe platforms like Workfront and Experience Manager to help users take actions based on insights across various dashboards. Other features include integrations with other platforms like Slack to help employees communicate and collaborate.

 

As for the type of content Charlie helps create, Pfizer is starting with digital media, emails and digital presentations that sales teams use with physicians. Another area it’s exploring is helping to research and write drafts for medical articles. Large language models also gather insights across therapeutic areas to better understand customers and treatments. For example, Worple mentioned how a parent might be affected by a migraine differently than someone without a family.

 

“You actually start creating different insights into who your customer is,” said Worple. “And then [knowing] what the actual pain point is for them. It’s not something we would classify as medical research. That insight of ‘X percentage of these people are this type of individual’ really helps you understand who your customer is. Now you know how to talk to them better.”

 

Spinning off Marcel

 

Charlie was trained on data from a range of sources, according to Worple. For generating marketing content, Pfizer uses training data from approved content that is filed by each category of treatment (such as oncology, endocrinology, etc.) and by specific products. It also uses segmentation models to teach Charlie about types of messaging that’s relevant to each segment and what’s most important.

 

While content creation is powered by a custom version of ChatGPT, Charlie uses recommendation algorithms. Pfizer’s also creating ways to use natural language processing (NLP) for queries related to internal research, cases studies and performance marketing data. And to prevent Charlie from giving inaccurate information or other “hallucinations,” answers are validated with source material based on previously published and validated Pfizer content. There’s also a process for reviewing and validating outputs.

 

Pfizer’s efforts are a collaboration with Publicis Groupe, which helped to build Charlie based on its existing Marcel AI platform. According to Marcel president Arpit Jain, Marcel is like the “base house” and Charlie is the version customized to Pfizer’s needs. He added that Publicis Groupe also has a dedicated team that helps maintain and evolve Charlie every day. Last month, Publicis announced major AI updates of its own including a new platform called CoreAI.

 

Because health care data is so sensitive, Pfizer is making sure Charlie’s collection and use of data meets various internal and external privacy requirements. Based on who is using Charlie, the platform can tailor its features to an employee’s role, how they use it and the types of data users engage with. That all makes data governance especially key, both in terms of accuracy and privacy.

 

“You’ve got to be very careful,” Jain said. “The last thing you want is to have some crazy data that you did not clean up right. And especially in healthcare, it could be a matter of life and death. If you recommend the wrong iPhone, it’s okay — it’s not the end of the world. But if you recommend the wrong medicine, God forbid something like that happens.”

 

Along with content creation, using generative AI for medical, legal and regulatory reviews is a key feature other pharma companies are also exploring, according to analysts covering the space. It’s also seen as low cost and lower risk, but high reward.

 

Marketers are excited about using generative AI to help with global rollouts of content that’s translated AI and localized for each market, according to Gartner analyst Chris Beland.

 

“The cost optimization potential is significant, but not without risk,” Beland said. “There are obvious implications in a consumer or [health care providers] seeing flawed or unauthentic content, but there could also be unintentional implications on the strategic, measurement, and approval workflows if not properly planned for.”

 

Generating ads — and more

 

Beyond marketing, generative AI could generate between $60 billion and $110 billion in annual economic value for the pharma and medical product industries, according to a January report by the McKinsey Global Institute. The report also mentioned that marketing-related uses for generative AI could help halve content creation costs and increase production pipelines by 20%. The technology could also double or triple the speed of approving content.

 

According to WARC, pharma and healthcare companies make up the third-fastest growing product segment for global ad spending behind financial services and technology/electronics. In the U.S. alone, the firm forecasts pharma and healthcare ad spending to reach $34.6 billion in 2024, or 16.7% more than 2023.

 

Some companies in various industries are exploring ways to generate synthetic data based on first-party data, according to Paul Stringer, WARC’s managing editor for research & insights. That way, companies can create audiences to look like their customers without exposing any personal information. However, he said it’s important that companies make sure they don’t end up replicating real-world biases in the process.

 

“If you don’t give these generative AI models the right training data, what you end up doing is leaving yourself at massive, massive risk of amplifying the existing bias and gaps in your customer data,” Stringer said.

 

Other agencies are also building their own generative AI tools for pharma clients. One is CMI Media Group, a media agency owned by WPP. (A few weeks ago, WPP said it would invest £250 million in 2024 to build its AI initiatives.) According to Justin Freid, CMI’s chief media & innovation officer, the tool will debut later this month and already is being tested with social and display ads, with a plan to later include video.

 

Along with helping in legal reviews, CMI is using the tool to help generate content personalized for each audience or optimized based on a platform’s performance data. For example, it might include changing the background of an ad based on the season of the year. The variations all still stay within set creative guidelines, but Freid said it opens up “a myriad of testing opportunities” to see what works with each audience.

 

“They still do need to be approved, but these are variations of creative versus like whole new campaigns,” Freid said. “The in-depth analysis of that new ad doesn’t need to be done…It’s nothing ridiculous where it’s a new tagline with a new claim or anything like that. We keep it simple, but we have found it to be more effective if it is more relevant to the end user.”

16594: Health & Wellness Field Feeling Unhealthy & Unwell…?

Publicis Health posted a wave of job listings for multiple positions. Imagine that.

 

The scenario actually underscores how White holding companies have fueled a commoditization of services and talent, whereby cookie-cutter White advertising agencies are staffed by repetitive, redundant, and replaceable drones.

 

Hopefully, IPG employees adversely affected by the Pfizer fiasco will be able to smoothly transition to Publicis Health. Although it might feel like going from one flaming dumpster to another.

16592: Pharma Karma For White Holding Companies…?

 

Fierce Pharma reported Pfizer injected its creative business into the global ass of a single White holding company—Publicis Groupe—roughly 10 months after a shootout that led to splitting marketing assignments between Publicis and IPG.

 

It’s gotta be a bitter pill to swallow for IPG—the former lead creative co-conspirator—although Pfizer claimed the jilted White holding company would retain certain undefined chores. Which sounds like going from running the hospital to bed pan duties.

 

There’s a bit of pharma karma at work here. After all, White holding companies have been closing, consolidating, casting off, and crapping on their own enterprises—ultimately disrupting people’s lives in the process. So, it’s kinda funny to see the corporations get a taste of their own medicine.

 

Pfizer shifts creative business to Publicis in latest marketing move

 

By Andrea Park

 

Less than a year after divvying up its marketing work between two firms, Publicis Groupe and Interpublic Group, Pfizer is tweaking the distribution of duties among the pair.

 

The Big Pharma has shifted its global creative business to Publicis’ purview, it confirmed to Fierce Pharma Marketing.

 

Previously, IPG was Pfizer’s lead creative partner; it’ll reportedly hang on to product PR and health brief responsibilities for the drugmaker, according to Campaign. Publicis, meanwhile, adds creative to an existing list of Pfizer marketing duties that includes data, media and production.

 

“As Pfizer evolves its marketing model, the company is deeply committed to the flexible, two-agency partnership that was put in place last year,” Pfizer said in a statement sent to Fierce Pharma Marketing. “Publicis and IPG, each with their respective areas of responsibility, will continue to help drive cutting-edge and data-driven integrated marketing communications focused on the value our science and our breakthroughs.”

 

Publicis declined to comment on the switch.

 

The shuffle comes about 10 months after Pfizer first tapped both Publicis and IPG to take over its marketing matters, which in turn came shortly after the company appointed Andreas “Drew” Panayiotou, a Verily alum, as its first-ever biopharma global chief marketing officer.

 

Panayiotou reportedly conducted an agency review after taking on the role, ultimately resulting in the selection of Publicis and IPG to head up Pfizer’s marketing. At the time of last spring’s announcement, he told PR Week that “consolidating and centralizing” the company’s agency model would help make its marketing business “more innovative, nimbler and data-driven.”

 

That shift for Pfizer’s marketing business, which is valued at $1.41 billion, added up to the biggest account move of last year by Campaign’s count.

 

Since then, Pfizer’s marketing moves have included a star-studded COVID-19 booster campaign last fall, an ad for its pneumonia vaccine during this year’s Oscars and, in perhaps its most high-profile spot, a Super Bowl LVIII commercial that celebrated scientific progress—and, of course, the role the pharma has played in that progress—which it reportedly produced in collaboration with Publicis.

 

Separately from the Oscars and Super Bowl ads, Pfizer kicked off the year by majorly upping its general TV ad spending: In January, it poured $22.7 million into its “If it’s Covid, Paxlovid” spot, which had previously been backed by just $6.7 million in December, and spent $17.6 million on ads for its Abrysvo RSV vaccine, down from $18 million the month before, earning Pfizer the fourth and 10th spots on the month’s ranking of pharma DTC spending. A month later, however, Pfizer was nowhere to be found on the top 10 list for February, which saw a significant month-over-month decrease in overall spending.

16260: Why Pfizer Pitch Was Pfft.

 

Advertising Age announced that Pfizer handed its global account to White holding companies Publicis Groupe and IPG after a massive shootout reportedly involving numerous White holding companies and incumbent Dentsu.

 

Not surprisingly, the Ad Age piece made no references to non-White advertising firms. In short, it looks like multicultural marketing professionals were excluded from the pitch process—which is outrageous on at least three levels:

 

First, people of color receive unequal attention from the global healthcare system. Indeed, no one denies that the system is infested with systemic racism. Pfizer’s apparent disregard for DEI in selecting its marketing partners reflects a harsh reality too often exposed in society—and especially in Adland.

 

Second, Pfizer rose to prominence in recent years with its vaccine for COVID-19—an infectious disease disproportionately affecting people of color. Again, the company appears to be ignoring its biggest audiences.

 

Third, Pfizer Global CMO Drew Panayiotou declared, “Health care is a local thing. So how do we think about products that are global that are made for the world, but connect them the right way locally?” Um, if the definition of “local” encompasses community culture—as well as standard geographics and demographics—how does the Big Pharma enterprise hope to authentically connect by engaging with White holding companies that have failed to attain any semblance of cultural competency and basic human empathy?

 

Perhaps Ad Age simply neglected to probe for the DEI components of the Pfizer-Publicis-IPG conspiracy. The White holding companies undoubtedly hyped—i.e., lied about—their respective heat shields and fabricated multicultural capabilities.

 

Yet in the end, this scenario represents sick, sickness, and sickening aspects of the healthcare and marketing industries.

 

On a positive note, Pfizer offers a new category for Byron Allen to file a lawsuit.

 

Pfizer Awards Global Account To Publicis And IPG—Behind One Of The Year’s Biggest Reviews

 

Under a new CMO, the pharma giant is switching up its marketing strategy

 

By Adrianne Pasquarelli

 

Pfizer rose to a new level of prominence as one of just three main providers of the COVID-19 vaccine and booster shots. Now, as emergency restrictions have eased and many have moved past the pandemic, the pharmaceutical giant is changing the way it markets its brand, with a new chief marketing officer, and, as of today, a new agency roster.

 

Pfizer has awarded its “integrated global engine” to Publicis Groupe and named Interpublic Group of Cos. its lead creative partner, three months after initiating a massive review incorporating advertising creative, media, PR and production duties.

 

It is a major victory for both Publicis and IPG, which beat out multiple holding companies in one of the industry’s most hotly contested—and lucrative—reviews of the year. MediaLink was the consultant on the review, which kicked off in February. Dentsu’s Carat was the incumbent on U.S. media, while global media is handled by various agencies across the globe.

 

Publicis, by handling data and tech, media and creative production, will help form the new Pfizer marketing machine. Last year, New York-based Pfizer spent $2.8 billion on worldwide advertising, up from $2 billion in 2021, according to the company’s financial documents. Yet the bulk of the $100 billion brand’s spend is in the U.S., where Pfizer ranked as the 36th largest advertiser, spending $1.49 billion in the U.S. in 2021, according to Ad Age’s Datacenter.

 

“Pfizer is a leader,” said Drew Panayiotou, who was hired as the drug company’s first global chief marketing officer in the fall after working as CMO of Verily, Alphabet’s life sciences research arm. “We are looking at how the company goes to market and how to continue to be a leader—to do things that others don’t do in the industry in service of driving science and driving breakthroughs.”

 

IPG was not immediately available for comment and Publicis had no comment.

 

“We are proud of the Carat team and our long-term partnership as Pfizer’s U.S. media partner,” said Jacki Kelley CEO, Dentsu Americas chief global client officer. “The progress and success we have shared is a testament to the amazing people on both sides and our critical partners. We are inspired by Pfizer as a company and by Drew’s ambitious agenda for marketing and wish him and everyone at Pfizer continued success.”

 

The marketing restructuring is the culmination of several years of transition for Pfizer, as the company strives to return to its science-driven roots. In 2020, Pfizer spun off its Upjohn generic drugs business, combining it with competitor Mylan Pharma to form a new company, Viatris. That left Pfizer to focus on its health-based innovation and be more agile and science-focused, according to Panayiotou.

 

Last year, Pfizer continued telling its brand story with a redesigned logo—trading its old blue pill for a more modern helix-type symbol that screams science, particularly after the COVID-19 vaccine breakthroughs. Earlier this year, Pfizer amplified this theme with an emotional campaign from Grey New York pitting losers such as fear, sorrow and illness against the winner of science.

 

COVID vaccine momentum

 

Pfizer’s success as an early administer of the COVID-19 vaccine helped catapult the brand into mainstream recognition and appeal beyond the pharmaceutical aisle. Vaccine-awareness campaigns with celebrities including Michael Phelps, Questlove, Pink and Jean Smart attracted even more support. Now, the pharma titan plans to continue its momentum with its new agency partner and revitalized marketing department.

 

“We had spent all those months not knowing what was going to happen with the pandemic, and suddenly, they give us that magical 95% efficacy moment—even my mom now knows what Pfizer is,” said Manuel Hermosilla, assistant professor of marketing at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School. “That moment imprinted on many of us a re-enchantment with the pharmaceutical industry, that feeling that scientific magic is possible and Pfizer is a company that knows how to make it happen.”

 

Of course, Pfizer’s was not the only vaccine administered during the pandemic. Moderna, backed by the star power of Dolly Parton, and Johnson & Johnson also got brand boosts. Moderna, in particular, has been trying to parlay its COVID-19 gains into more brand recognition. The pharma company recently ran an adtouting its own scientific prowess as more than a COVID-vaccine company. The commercial focused on the mRNA science behind the vaccine and how it can help in other medical areas.

 

A veteran marketer

 

Yet Panayiotou, Pfizer’s new CMO, is a veteran marketer with a plethora of the industry experience needed to continue the brand’s rise. Prior to his two-year stint at Verily, he built a business incubator at Chick-fil-A, led BBDO’s Atlanta office and worked as U.S. CMO of Best Buy. Panayiotou also has marketing experience from the Walt Disney Co. and the Coca-Cola Co., where he developed marketing for Sprite and Fanta. In the mid-’90s, he worked as a product director at Johnson & Johnson.

 

“I got a call to come to Pfizer and what did attract me is the fact that I could build something that doesn’t exist and has never existed before,” said Panayiotou about the opportunity to build up Pfizer’s marketing department into a more agile machine.

 

That reconstruction starts with streamlining the brand’s agency roster. In the past, Pfizer has worked with every holding company. That includes such shops as WPP’s Grey New York, which created the brand’s most recent campaign, VMLY&R, EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker; IPG’s FCB and IPG Health; and Omnicom’s Rapp, PHD, TBWA\WorldHealth, according to Ad Age’s Datacenter.

 

“We clearly realized we needed to have more simplification of our agency structure,” said Panayiotou, noting Pfizer needed to simplify how it goes to market and make integrated marketing easier. “We also wanted to leverage scale.”

 

Global products, local connections

 

The appointment is a big win for Publicis, which has seen a spate of activity of late with its “Power of One” strategy. The holding company, whose revenue jumped nearly 20% last year, was the big winner in LVMH’s North American media review earlier this month.

 

IPG’s Mediabrands, meanwhile, just won U.S. media buying and planning duties for the direct-to-consumer brands at Bristol Myers Squibb.

 

Under Panayiotou, Pfizer has also been building up its internal marketing department, which numbers around 1,000 staffers. The company is hiring for four key areas, including UX and design, to improve the digital experience for patients and doctors; innovation, to better integrate new channels such as telemedicine; data science and analytics, to unearth better insights; and media and performance marketing, to deliver the best ROIs and engagement on campaigns using a data-driven approach.

 

Pfizer is a global company but “health care is a local thing,” said Panayiotou. “So how do we think about products that are global that are made for the world, but connect them the right way locally?”

 

Pfizer is in the midst of a busy 18 months in which it plans to launch 19 medicines and vaccines, including a dozen new medicines and seven expansions. With its new agency partner, the company expects to be smarter and faster with how it markets such products.

 

“The Goldilocks element is to really figure out how to do high-tech and high-touch marketing,” said Panayiotou.